1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of computer services. Specifically, the present invention relates to methods, systems, and computer program products for applying one or more functions during processing that may occur in a server providing one or more services.
2. Background and Related Art
Typically, before being deployed in a live system, services undergo significant testing to uncover programming errors and to evaluate performance. While useful, such testing often is able only to estimate full-scale use. As a result, certain program errors or performance problems may go undetected in development or testing environments. Finding these latent problems usually involves monitoring the operation of a service in one form or another. Furthermore, independent of programming errors or unexpected performance considerations, monitoring a service may be helpful in uncovering hardware failures and system attacks.
However, monitoring services for purposes of debugging, performance, hardware problems, system attacks, and the like, often involves various complex issues. For example, services by nature tend to be accessed by large numbers of clients. The shear volume of transactions can make monitoring services a significant exercise. Moreover, monitoring itself may introduce some amount of processing overhead. While the overhead for a single transaction is relatively small, the aggregate overhead for a large number of transactions may result in unacceptable levels of performance and skew any conclusions that are reached from the monitoring.
As a general rule, discovering problems through monitoring is an iterative process. For example, as noted above, it may be impractical to produce all possible monitoring information at all times, either due to the amount of monitoring information that will be produced or due to the negative effect that such monitoring may have on overall system performance. Therefore, monitoring often begins by detecting some type of high-level irregularity. Once discovered, the high-level irregularity may lead to more specific monitoring of increasingly specific processing or functionality until the problem's cause is discovered and corrected. After a particular problem is corrected, monitoring often returns back to the high-level system view.
In some systems, the iterative process of moving back and forth between high-level system monitoring and relatively lower level monitoring of specific service processing or functionality may require shutting services and/or servers down and restarting them. Furthermore, certain monitoring tools may require significant expertise to use, including programming skills. For many, the level of skill required may reduce the effectiveness of a particular monitoring tool or prevent its use all together. Also, monitoring tools are often specific to the environment in which they run, requiring administrators of heterogeneous systems to use different monitoring tools for each distinct system. Accordingly, methods, systems, and computer program products are desired for dynamically applying a function during any of various processing steps that may occur in providing a service to a client system.